Time Essay: The Dynamics of Revolution

Edmund Burke cast an indignant eye across the English Channel at the
French Revolution and wrote sarcastically:
"Amidst assassination, massacre and confiscation, they are forming plans
for the good order of future society." Burke was the prototype of
skepticism about certain revolutions. Since the French Terror, history
has paraded past too many Utopian dramas of transformation that ended
by being as totalitarian, as murderous, as the regimes that they swept
awaytriumphs of hopeful zealotry over experience. Stalin turned the
Russian Revolution into a self-devouring machine that crushed its own
in the basement...